When George Stevens asked Charlton Heston to play the lead in The Greatest Story Ever Told he checked with his agent exactly which lead. It was John the Baptist. “Trust me,” said Heston, “in a movie called The Greatest Story Ever Told, the star is not going to be John the Baptist.” I wonder what Heston would make of the current Radio Times cover advertising The Passion (BBC One, Sunday)? Here James Nesbitt, all armoured up as Pontius Pilate, shoulders his way to the front of the shot ahead of Ben Daniels as the priest Caiaphas and Joseph Mawles as, well, Jesus. “Yes,” you can imagine the editor telling her art director, “Jesus is a big name, but Jimmy Nesbitt's a bigger one.”

As in The Greatest Story Ever Told, The Passion jostles with well known names, including Paul Nicholls in the David McCallum role (Judas) and Penelope Wilton in Dorothy Mc- Guire's (the Virgin Mary). Once you get past his accent, Nesbitt is clearly going to be a better Pilate than Telly Savalas (wouldn't anyone?). Sadly, the story starts too late to include a John the Baptist, but at least it begins earlier than Mel Gibson's The Passion the of Christ, which means the donkey gets what G.K. Chesterton called his “one far fierce hour and sweet”.

The virtue of Nigel Stafford-Clark's Passion is that it looks historically real but not historic: no one knows, aside presumably from Jesus, that this will be the week that changes the West for ever. The crowds are in Jerusalem for the Passover and it is a busy time with money to be changed, taxes to be levied and the odd murder to be investigated. The last thing Pilate or Caiaphas wants is a mystic coming into town knowing which buttons to press to get a rise from everyone. At this stage, my sympathies are with the ruling classes rather than the conjuror with an answer to everything.

The downside was that episode one was a bit of a history lesson. Frank Deasy's script had Pilate tell his colleagues what they must already know: “Tiberius wants a peaceful Judaea so that the riches of Syria can pass safely through on the way to Rome.” There were some nice touches, such as having a dwarf ask Jesus the question that gets the “render unto Caesar what is Caesar's answer” but there were some Life of Brian scenes too, as when a disciple told JC, “Your mother's here” and Christ slinks out for an ear-battering.

There was also the Jesus problem, the one Max von Sydow failed to crack in The Greatest Story. Joseph Mawle, the hard-of-hearing actor from Soundproof, plays him as meek, mild and hangdog, as self-questioning as Hamlet. That had to be wrong. If He did not believe 100 per cent He was right how could He have persuaded everyone else? I longed for the panache of Dennis Potter, who took a grip of this story in his 1969 Play for Today: Son of Man and made Jesus a political revolutionary.

But the proof of the Passion will undoubtedly be its crucifixion scene. With any luck it will not remind us of John Wayne's moment as a centurion at the foot of the cross in the George Stevens movie. He had to say “Truly, He is the son of God”. Stevens suggested that he say it again with awe. Wayne paused and looked upwards: “Aw, truly He is the son of God.”

Gavin and Stacey, back for its second series on BBC Three, continues to pose the kind of billing question Heston had: who are the real stars of this thing? The pair were back from their honeymoon in Greece. It was “nice”. But who wanted to hear about that when Stacey's friend Nessa still hadn't told Gavin's friend Smithy that she had his bun in her capacious oven? Mathew Horne and Joanna Page play the nominal leads with such Christ-like modesty that one feels vaguely aggrieved on their behalf that the best lines are written for Smithy and Nessa by the very actors who play them.

Mind you, James Corden and Ruth Jones came up with some crackers as they elaborated further on Nessa's extensive “Past”. It turned out Nessa had driven the lorries for The Who's world tour. “Until I found out some things about Pete Townshend I didn't like. All I'll say - and I said it to his face - is where's the book?” This comedy is less mild than it looks and even funnier than I remembered.

Out of the Box

Of which party, as Blake said of Milton, is Joseph Mawle? Tonight he is back on BBC One as the Son of God in The Passion. During the day he will have been rehearsing at the Almeida Theatre in London for a courtroom comedy called The Last Days of Judas Iscariot in which he plays... Judas.

I mentioned last week the riotous scenes as a number of TV critics met over dinner to discuss the shortlist for the Sky+ Audience Award for Programme of the Year 2007 at the Bafta awards on April 20. Well, now I can announce the nominees: The Apprentice, Andrew Marr's History of Modern Britain, Britain's Got Talent, Cranford, Gavin & Stacey and Strictly Come Dancing. The “esteemed panel”, as we are called on the press release, are pretty chuffed with the contenders we have come up with. To vote for one of them visit www.bestonthebox.com

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